The Militant Suffrage Movement. Citizenship and Resistance in Britain 1860-1930

June Hannam

I begin by thanking
Dr Hannam for her thoughtful engagement with my book. I appreciate
especially her care in representing my arguments and wish to respond
to the very important questions she raises.

As Dr Hannam notes, it is difficult to make an original contribution
to the literature on women’s suffrage in the British context
as a good deal of very high quality research has been produced in
the last twenty years. Much of that work has been done by social
historians, who have understandably been concerned with locating
suffragists at the centre of their accounts. My contribution has
been to reorient the debate, in order to contextualize the women’s
suffrage movement within late-Victorian and Edwardian political
culture. I have redrawn the distinction between militants and non-militants
on the basis of the attitudes each took toward the state, thereby
blurring the constitutional/militant dichotomy, but from a direction
not traditionally taken. All suffragists were constitutionalists
in that they believed that the British constitution and political
tradition included women. They differed on how to obtain political
satisfaction. Members of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage
Societies demanded political rights, but members of the militant
organisations refused to cooperate with the government so long as
women went unenfranchised. The distinction is critical because it
speaks to an engagement with the state drawing from the liberal
and radical traditions, respectively. In this sense, my argument
widens and deepens analysis of the relationship between women’s
suffrage and radicalism as it locates militancy as a political strategy
with roots in radical, rather than strictly labor, traditions.

My emphasis on radical, rather than labour, traditions means that
my focus is less on socialism and Labour Party activism than it
is on the relationship between liberalism and radicalism in late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British politics. In this
respect, my work seeks to break free from paradigms which locate
women’s suffrage within the framework of social history, emphasising
the recovery of women’s agency by demonstrating the existence
of a separate women’s culture among suffragists. The Militant
Suffrage Movement attempts to resituate one specific struggle
for women’s political rights (the militant strand within the
British movement) within the broader framework of the development
of democracy. In that telling, the struggle for the vote is less
a triumphal progress towards full equality than it is a skirmish
in the development of liberal democracy, wherein the enfranchisement
of women masks the troubling reduction of a process (citizenship)
to a status by its redefinition as the mere act of voting. Consequently,
individual and group engagement with the state is the subject of
scrutiny, rather than the political loyalties and identifications
of women.